Australian Glacier Loss Accelerates

Global warming melts Australia's glaciers

Planetark.org, Reuters News Service

, June 4, 2001

SYDNEY - Australia's glaciers are melting.Scientists say the shrinking of
Australia's little-known glaciers on remote, sub-Antarctic Heard Island in the
Indian Ocean reveals global warming now stretches from the tropics to the edge
of Antarctica.

"The recession of many glaciers during the past 50 years has been
unprecedented in modern times for Heard Island," glaciologist Andrew Ruddell,
with the Australian Antarctic Division, told Reuters on Friday.

"We can expect that with a warming world that this will progress further
south. When we see warming going on this far south, we are always concerned
about the Antarctic," he said.

Antarctic temperatures, averaging around minus 20 to minus 10 degrees Celsius
(minus four to plus 14 degrees Fahrenheit), are still far too cold to show any
significant effect from global warming.

"But we have seen break up of ice shelf in the Antarctic Peninsula region,
and that is getting into the zero degree range because it is further north, so
there is a slight change there," said Ruddell.

A five-month Australian scientific expedition to Heard Island which ended in
March discovered global warming was dramatically changing the island's harsh and
hostile environment.

Since 1947 the temperature has risen 0.7C (1.3F) causing glaciers to melt
rapidly.

The island's 34 glaciers have decreased by 11 percent in area and 12 percent
in volume - half the loss occured in the 1980s.

Brown Glacier was 6.3 km (3.9 miles) long in 1947, but has retreated 1.2 km
(three quarters of a mile) by 2000, losing more than 26 percent of its area. The
Jacka Glacier is half its length and the Stephenson Glacier has lost 27 percent
of its area, exposing part of its bed rock.

SIGNIFICANT RETREAT

"It's a very significant retreat. Glaciers are very sensitive to climate
change," said Ruddell. "The rate of retreat is similar to New Zealand alps and
European alps and Central Asia."

Recent studies of glaciers and ice caps in Tibet, Africa and Peru have shown
dramatic reductions over the past few years due to global warming.

Photographs of Kenya's Mount Kilimanjaro in February showed its had lost 82
percent of its ice since 1912 and scientists calculate Kilimanjaro will lose its
snow between 2010 and 2020.

Scientists say Heard Island, discovered by U.S. captain William Heard in 1853
and a former fur-seal hunting site, is an ideal laboratory to study climate
change as it is perched on the edge of the Polar zone and isolated from the
effects of human habitation, unlike the densely populated tropics.

They say the rapid animal and vegetation colonisation of Heard Island as
glaciers melt is further indicator of the extent of global warming now in the
sub-Antarctic.

King penguins numbers have exploded from only three breeding pairs in 1947 to
25,000 in 2001. The fur seal population has recovered from near extinction to
now number more than 28,000 adults and 1,000 pups. The island also has a lush
green carpet of cushion plants and a member of the rose family is thriving.

"I didn't recognise it," said the Australian Antarctic Division's chief plant
scientist Dana Bergstrom, who returned to Heard Island on the expedition after a
14-year absence.

"I was walking across sites that I had previously crawled across. What was
barren ground had cushion plants growing over them," she said. "From an
Antarctic perspective it is dramatic."